The main aim of the early Fellows of the Royal Society was to enquire after ‘matters of fact’. They used a variety of methods to pursue facts, one of which was collecting man-made and natural artefacts. The first historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat, wrote in 1667 that the Royal Society intended to make ‘a General Collection of all the Effects of Arts, and the Common, or Monstrous Works of Nature’. Indeed, he claimed, they had already made a good start on this project:

‘they have already drawn together into one Room, the greatest part of all the several kinds of things, that are scatter’d throughout the Universe’.

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